Name: Twitter removes 30,000 Chinese, Russian and Turkish accounts linked to government propaganda - ABC News
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Twitter removes 30,000 Chinese, Russian and Turkish accounts linked to government propaganda - ABC News

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Twitter removes 30,000 Chinese, Russian and Turkish accounts linked to government propagandaShareTwitter is disclosing the details of more than 32,000 accounts it has suspended and removed from its platform after investigations found ties to state-run propaganda and disinformation operations in China, Russia and Turkey.The tech giant has been investigating suspicious users which have been flooding social media feeds with pro-government rhetoric in a bid to manipulate public debate.Twitter has shared the data with researchers at the US-based Stanford Internet Observatory and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in Canberra."Every account and piece of content associated with these operations has been permanently removed from the service," Twitter said in a statement.The largest number of suspended accounts — 23,750 profiles — were linked to the Chinese Government after a surge in activity was detected at ."In general, this entire network was involved in a range of manipulative and coordinated activities," the company said."They were tweeting predominantly in Chinese languages and spreading geopolitical narratives favourable to the Communist Party of China, while continuing to push deceptive narratives about the political dynamics in Hong Kong."Another 150,000 accounts were identified as "amplifiers", retweeting and further spreading the propaganda.ASPI took a particular interest in the Chinese data, poring over the information and finding the accounts were ."The activity that's focused on the Hong Kong protests is really highlighting, suggesting that the protesters themselves are violent, they're placing the emphasis on the cause of the violence of being on the side of the protesters," ASPI's Dr Jake Wallis told the ABC."There's a lot of activity that is designed to support the police in Hong Kong."There's a great deal of imagery within the dataset that is dehumanising of the protesters themselves — so they're often portrayed or presented as cockroaches."Dr Wallis said there were a number of indicators which suggested accounts were not credible, such as how few followers they had."Twitter is banned in the People's Republic of China, however when we looked at the posting patterns of tweets within this dataset, they clearly aligned with working hours Monday to Friday Beijing time … high-volume posting that eased off at the weekend," he said."That's an obvious indication of coordinated, inauthentic behaviour."By extrapolating from Twitter's dataset, this operation has recently pivoted in an attempt to weaponise US domestic protest and civil unrest, in order to create the perception of moral equivalence with the suppression of protests in Hong Kong."Australia's Foreign Minister Marise Payne said all platforms needed to take "disinformation" seriously, particularly in the context of a global pandemic."It shows just how serious the problem of disinformation is," she said."This is dangerous, it's unacceptable, it has the potential to undermine global health efforts and trust."Twitter's other investigations found more than 1,000 accounts linked to Russian propaganda, including promoting the ruling pro-Vladimir Putin United Russia party, and more than 7,000 accounts linked to activity in Turkey which "amplify political narratives favourable" to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan."Technical signals point to the network being associated with the youth wing of the party and a centralized network that maintained a significant number of compromised accounts," Twitter said."As a result, the network we're disclosing today includes several compromised accounts associated with organisations critical of President Erdogan and the Turkish Government. "These compromised accounts have been repeated targets of account hacking and takeover efforts by the state actors identified above."Twitter stated the accounts had also been used for commercial activities, such as promoting cryptocurrency.Dr Wallis argued the use of social media accounts, once the domain of state-based propaganda campaigns, had started to be picked up by criminals, terrorists and "fringe political" groups.He said people were buying and selling hacked and stolen accounts in a bid to aid their causes, prompting companies such as Twitter to constantly review how they police content being posted online."The challenge of managing who accesses the platform, what kind of content flows across the platform, in this scale of billions of users, is an incredible challenge," Dr Wallis said."Advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning allow the platforms to try to capture much of this activity before it even hits the intended audiences."But malign actors will play an adversarial cat and mouse game, constantly refining their tactics so that they can exploit the benefits that access to these audiences brings."11 Jun 202011 Jun 2020Thu 11 Jun 2020 at 9:08pm, 11 Jun 202011 Jun 2020Thu 11 Jun 2020 at 11:53pmMore on:

Twitter removes 30,000 Chinese, Russian and Turkish accounts linked to government propagandaShareTwitter is disclosing the details of more than 32,000 accounts it has suspended and removed from its platform after investigations found ties to state-run propaganda and disinformation operations in China, Russia and Turkey.The tech giant has been investigating suspicious users which have been flooding social media feeds with pro-government rhetoric in a bid to manipulate public debate.Twitter has shared the data with researchers at the US-based Stanford Internet Observatory and the Australian...

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Twitter removes 30,000 Chinese, Russian and Turkish accounts linked to government propaganda - ABC News

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